9 STATES IN PLAN TO CUT EMISSIONS BY POWER PLANTS

By ANTHONY DePALMA

Published: August 24, 2005

Officials in New York and eight other Northeastern states have come to a preliminary agreement to freeze power plant emissions at their current levels and then reduce them by 10 percent by 2020, according to a confidential draft proposal.

The cooperative action, the first of its kind in the nation, came after the Bush administration decided not to regulate the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Once a final agreement is reached, the legislatures of the nine states will have to enact it, which is considered likely.

Enforcement of emission controls could potentially result in higher energy prices in the nine states, which officials hope can be offset by subsidies and support for the development of new technology that would be paid for with the proceeds from the sale of emission allowances to the utility companies.

The regional initiative would set up a market-driven system to control emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, from more than 600 electric generators in the nine states. Environmentalists who support a federal law to control greenhouse gases believe that the model established by the Northeastern states will be followed by other states, resulting in pressure that could eventually lead to the enactment of a national law.

California, Washington and Oregon are in the early stages of exploring a regional agreement similar to the Northeastern plan. The nine states in the Northeastern agreement are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. They were brought together in 2003 by a Republican governor, George E. Pataki of New York, who broke sharply and openly with the Bush administration over the handling of greenhouse gases and Washington's refusal to join more than 150 countries in signing the Kyoto Protocols, the agreement to reduce emissions that went into effect earlier this year.

Mr. Pataki, who may be considering a run for the Republican nomination for president, has refrained from criticizing President Bush directly, but he has repeatedly said that the states need to act on their own even if the Bush administration has not made the issue a priority.

Preliminary details of the region's emission reduction goals were included in a confidential memo circulated among officials of all nine states that was given to The New York Times by a person who supports the enactment of national legislation to control emissions, but who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to have the memo.

Andrew Rush, a spokesman for Governor Pataki, declined to comment on the draft because it was not a final document. However, he said, ''a tremendous amount of progress has been made and we look forward to continuing to work with the other states so that we can reach a final agreement that will build on the governor's strong record of protecting the environment and reducing harmful emissions.''

Samuel Wolfe, assistant commissioner for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, who has been actively involved in the negotiations, said that there is still work to be done on the proposal but that ''the states are working very productively to resolve the issues and we have very high hopes of getting a resolution through to all the states by the end of September.''

In a statement, James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, tried to put the states' initiative in a positive light. ''We welcome all efforts to help meet the president's goal for significantly reducing greenhouse gas intensity by investing in new, more efficient technologies,'' he said.

In recent years, New York and other Northeastern states have aggressively tried to reduce power plant emissions. Several have joined together to sue coal-fired power plants in Midwestern states that produce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide that drift across state borders and cause acid rain in the Northeast.

The Northeastern region is itself a substantial producer of greenhouse gases. Environmental groups calculate that the region's carbon dioxide emissions are roughly equivalent to those of Germany.

While any reductions achieved in the region would be significant, environmentalists believe that the real importance of the cooperative effort is in the example it sets for other states.

''We're not going to solve the problem of global warming in the Northeastern states,'' said Dale S. Bryk, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council who has been watching the regional effort since it was proposed by Governor Pataki in a letter to the other governors in April 2003. ''but we're showing that we have the American ingenuity to do this and we're setting a precedent in terms of the design of the program.''

As outlined in the draft, the regional carbon dioxide control plan would set specific caps on emissions that would drop over time.

The hope is that by providing long-range incentives for the electric generating companies to comply, the program will make improvements more cost-effective.